Elisabeth Hyder – decorative papers

When it came time to settle on a career, Elisabeth Hyder chose to teach kindergarten. In her native Switzerland, the training involved learning all sorts of crafts.

“We had to knit and paint and make toys,” Hyder said, surrounded by colorful artwork in her North Brookfield studio.

“Kindergarten teachers are the creative ones,” she added with a laugh.

Hyder is a master at making decorative paste papers, a European craft stretching back more than 200 years. She applies a mixture of paste and pigment onto acid-free paper and then creates a design using a variety of tools, many of which she has fashioned herself. Sometimes, her designs are patterns that she meticulously repeats; other times, they are free form. She works in a wide variety of colors — greens, reds, blues, yellows, purples, grays and browns — and through her patterns produces artwork that has a rich, three-dimensional effect.

Using her papers, Hyder handcrafts journals, albums, boxes, mobiles, collages and color studies. I first visited her sunlit studio 10 years ago and vividly recall being stunned by the beauty of these objects. I came away with boxes and journals, several of which I gave as holiday gifts that year. Those unique decorative items are still on display in the homes of family and friends.

Hyder is married to Darrell Hyder, who is the owner and operator of The Sun Hill Press, which for many years produced exquisite materials printed on a letterpress. She often collaborated with her husband, designing bookplates and a new pattern each year for note cards and stationery, as well as covers for Sun Hill miniature books, which are distributed by OrangeArt of Woodstock, Conn.

The Hyders met in Switzerland and remained there for several years, while Mr. Hyder, an American, worked in the printing business and studied graphic design. Within a couple of years after moving to Massachusetts in 1971, they bought a house in need of lots of work not far from the center of North Brookfield. “We just started scraping and sanding,” Hyder recalled.

By 1993, with their four children grown, Hyder was seeking a way to allow her artistic inclinations to flourish.

“I was always interested in textiles and papers and the papers won out,” she said. “Paste paper appeals to me because it is so endlessly creative. It’s like finger painting.”

As we sat at a long worktable in her studio, Hyder showed me several of the sculpting tools she has made to create her designs. Light and airy mobiles resembling birds in flight hung at one end of her studio, which she and her husband built for her in 1995. She handed me erasers into which she has carved leaves and letters and a half sun. She picked up a paint roller encircled with rubber bands. In her tool chest are combs and a thimble.

Hyder teaches workshops two or three times a year. From time to time, a student will use a tool in a different way. She noted that one design often leads to the next. “That’s so gratifying,” she said.

When Hyder began making paste paper in earnest, she did not think about the business end, but then realized that she had to do something with the items she was producing.

“You can’t just fill the house with it,” she said with a shrug.

She formed Brookfield PaperWorks and also sells her items at craft centers, such as the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton. One particular approach has proved most useful.